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Humans are social animals and like all social animals have fantastic mechanisms for synching up behavior. If I start yawning, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll start yawning. If I start puking, you’ll most likely yak along.

Most of the time, as Dr. Robert Provine explains in Laughter, this is a good thing:

It is, after all, often adaptive for social animals to coordinate their behavior: when one animal is spooked and runs, everyone runs; when a mother becomes anxious in the presence of a stranger, so does her infant. At this level, the group can be viewed as a superorganism, with each individual being a sensory and motor organ of the whole, contributing to the well being of the group and sharing vicariously in its collective experience.

Sometimes, this adaptive mechanism turns against. Mass hysteria—which is when contagious social emotions run amuck—is the result. My favorite mass hysteria story takes place in Tanzania, January of 1962. The problem started at a small Catholic boarding school for girls. It started when a couple girls started laughing. They kept laughing. They couldn’t stop.

Now laughter, like yawning and vomiting, is another contagious behavior. It spreads. So laughter spread from these few girls to the larger school. Pretty soon 95 of the 159 pupils were infected. Symptoms persisted, sometimes a few hours, sometimes longer than two weeks. The school was shut down on March 18, but the epidemic was far from done.

It infected the local village and neighboring towns. Two nearby boys schools were also closed. As were two farther out girls schools. The only good news was that it was laughter. In the middle ages, for example, a biting plague—another socially contagious behavior—spread among nuns in convents and all the way to the mother house in Rome.

Hypochondria can spread this way as well. In 2006, a Portuguese television show popular with teen girls depicted characters experience symptoms of a strange life-threatening illness. Pretty soon those symptoms leaped off the television and into real life, infecting some 300 students at more than 14 schools.

I mention all of this because we it’s Black Friday—a phenomena that may just be the biggest case of mass hysteria in history.

According to new research from the Consumer Electronics Association, 37 percentage of American adults who will go shopping on Black Friday. That’s over 152 million of us and up 10 percent from last year. And last year? We dropped a cool $11,400,000,000 in less than 24 hours.

And the majority of Black Friday shoppers claim they enjoy this experience—but consider what they’re enjoying: a night spent in a parking lot, massive lines, difficult parking, extra competition, muzak, this list goes on. These are not the kinds of things most people tend to like.

And consider how far from normal our behavior can go:

Porter Ranch, Calif. - 32-year-old Elizabeth Macias used pepper spray on fellow Walmart shoppers, injuring 20 people. Macias later turned herself in but has yet to face charges. According to the Los Angeles Times, police are unsure whether she used the pepper spray in an attempt to grab a discounted Xbox console, or in self-defense.

New York City: Crowds waiting to get inside a Hollister store busted through the locked doors and began looting around 1:15 a.m., according to the New York Post.

San Leandro, Calif.: 21-year-old Christopher Murillo was shot in the neck in the parking lot outside Walmart at about 1:55 a.m. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the incident was an attempted robbery.

Myrtle Beach, S.C. - A 55-year-old woman was shot in the leg during an armed robbery at about 1:12 a.m. outside Walmart, reported CBS affiliate WSPA.

All of this tells us something very unnerving about our always on, always connected world: we can go from memetic transmission to mass hysteria in lickety-split.

Now consider what this really means. From MK-ULTRA to the Manchurian Candidate, scientists and science fiction fans have been thinking about mind control for a very long time. But this is localized mind control—I program you; not national mind-control.

In fact, mass mind control has mostly been a target too out of reach. How to get an entire population to do your bidding? That takes some serious juju.

In Brave New World, for example, Aldous Huxley thought it would take a psychoactive drug like soma to make it happen ("All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of the defects"). George Orwell, in 1984, relied on extreme, chronic fear.

Turns out such measures weren’t necessary.

All it took was a day of bargains and a media hungry for a story—because that’s all it takes for a social organism in a heavily networked world.